When you plan an event, there’s only so much you can hope for. Especially when you’re dealing with a creative community like the Lindy Hop one. Most times you just hope that people don’t take the opportunity to embarrass themselves. That didn’t happen last night. Too much. I haven’t seen a show that consistently good in a very long time. Read the rest of this entry »

The Friday night and Saturday day activities at ILHC are in the books. Great music from the band and the DJ’s and awesome dancing from the competitors.

We had workshops through the day before the evening events started. I was able to sit in on Sylvia Sykes’ “What Judges Look For” workshop which drew a pretty big crowd in the main ballroom.

I didn’t really take notes, so I don’t want to put any words into Sylvia’s mouth. But I think that if anyone there was looking for the secret to doing well in competitions, they would have been sorely disappointed. However, it was a very pragmatic and insightful look into the other side of competitions.

The ballroom opened unceremoniously right at 8:00 pm, but filled up much faster than it did the night before. Of course, the Open Strictly Lindy Hop preliminary round started at 8:30 pm, and that had a huge number of couples. Read the rest of this entry »

Setting up for ILHC yesterday went pretty well, and ended ahead of schedule.

I really like the fact that we started on Thursday instead of Friday like we did last year. Last year we dove head long into the weekend; setting everything up, having people practice their routines on a dance floor that wasn’t completed, and then going straight into the dance and competitions.

This year felt much more casual. A lot of that had to do with the dedicated volunteers we have plus the super professional contractors. Read the rest of this entry »

Busy week as we make final preparations for this year’s International Lindy Hop Championships, so not a lot of time for updates. I thought I’d take this opportunity to wheel another note from my Facebook vault. I wrote this at the end of the first ILHC last year.

At 1:00 pm on Friday afternoon, we got official access to all the meeting spaces at the hotel. At that moment we had planned for the sound and the floors to be installed simultaneously, plenty of time before the risers arrived and the chairs to be set up for the 8:00 pm opening of the ballroom for social dancing.

At 1:01 pm on Friday afternoon, I was standing in the middle of an empty ballroom.

The guy delivering the floor was at lunch, the sound guys were delayed, and the volunteers for floor set up were no where to be found.

Another interesting trend during this period was the growing number of people, regardless of style, who worked intensely on partnering mechanics. Again, this is where crossover events had a major effect. Even if a Lindy Hopper would not appreciate the music or the general aesthetic of West Coast Swing, there could be no denying that WCS during this time period had a much more superior grasp of connection than was generally known in Lindy Hop at the time. Since WCS dancers were seen as superior dancers because of that grasp of technique, it led many people to focus on that. As with many other things dancers were doing at this time, it was eventually worked on to an extreme. Read the rest of this entry »

The combination of those trends mentioned in the previous posts contributed to the development of certain dance habits in Lindy Hoppers that were collectively called “Modern Savoy Lindy” or “Groove Lindy.” By some accounts, dancing like this already existed in some scenes such as Chicago and San Francisco. Some of this can be also be attributed to the influence of was being seen of WCS performers at crossover events. However, the buzz from the Minnies’ Moochers performance provided the spark for its nationwide popularity.[1]

One characteristic of this so called “groove” dancing is what Julius Yang dubbed as “micromusicality.”[2] This is the tendency for dancers to move their bodies to match the melody line of a song, and in some excessive cases, try to accent as many individual notes as possible. This had the important effect of inspiring dancers to progress away from simply executing random moves in time to the music, and become more in touch with the music. Read the rest of this entry »